


Frayed Wires

by CommanderInChief



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-10
Updated: 2017-07-10
Packaged: 2018-11-30 10:13:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11461467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CommanderInChief/pseuds/CommanderInChief
Summary: Kate Stewart is not going mad.





	Frayed Wires

“Darling?” Begins Jac. Even under the thick wash of a toothy white smile, Kate can detect a clip in her tone, _something is not right_ , “Could you pass me the salt, please?”

Even so, Kate does as she is asked. Here, the Doctor might pause, rewind, play, give commentary on the way she blinks past the vase -  _Pause, zoom, pla_ y - sees the fray in the rug without really seeing at all - _pan shot, kill the backing noise_  - or the grain of salt spilled over the edge of the plate when tipped a second too early -  _zoom again, slow motion, easy now._  Later, he’ll talk for six minutes straight - _replay -_ each fragment coming together as vital puzzle-pieces that she’d missed.

The doctor. The doctor. The doctor.

He’s there, Kate knows it.

She can sense when she’s being watched, you know.

Sometimes,  _sometimes_ , when her shoulders tingle, she’ll even tell them, mutter, whisper,  _yell_ , “I can see you,” She screams, sometimes with her voice but more often not.

Kate realises that she must be smirking because Jac’s eyebrows have gone together again.

Jac, like the rest of the they, does not get it.

They tell her it is an illusion, some vicious twisting of nerves spiralled the wrong way, they give her tablets that make them uncurl altogether until her body is as docile as the fat old therapy dog, only capable of hummmps and snores. They bind her into bed. They tell her she is a good girl. She was the head of UNIT once, she wants to say, and a mother of a son before that - though there is white noise between the two. She wants to tell them all that she is not a child.

Some of them think it was the mind wipes that sent her off like this, after the memory worm had embedded itself in her brain, the same pages rubbed out and written over so many times that it had began to tear holes. Others go for the blander explanation of plain old PTSD; together, amnesia and paranoia are bitter like forbidden fruit.

But either way, she is here. Here in this dizzying funfair of  _Lights! Camera! Action!_  where she’s saved six billion cookie-cutter lives with the same face and the walls feel like they may keel over if they were only pushed hard enough.

There are two reasons for this: the first has pillow-y soft hair, a xylophone laugh, the lingering taste of artificial coffee in her mouth - the other is simply that she doesn’t not know how to be anywhere else.

“Darling, are you okay?”

Kate looks up and her stomach curdles -  _zoom_ \- and she knows her response before her mouth moves. It is the response that has been said a thousand times in a thousand takes. Her lines are written. The camera angle fixed. Something is coming.

She takes a sip of water.

“Fine-”  _Pause_ \- “Why do you ask?”


End file.
